Measuring Decline
Introduction
Data
Data on Property Taxes, Elementary Education Expenditure, Private Industry and Total GDP at the county, commuting zone, state, and national levels.
Relationships Between the Variables
Defining Decline
What would be great is to be able to econometrically test when a county is “declining.” In the first step, it would be good to identify when a county is declining overall (GDP, poverty, etc) but ideally eventually apply this to the education outcome. My hope is that being able to identify counties that are “declining” we can either use this variable as a covariate or as a central point of analysis. The below analysis looks at state-level variables as a first step (mainly to aid in visual comparison and plotting). This has now been expanded to county and commuting zones levels.
Some current options:
- Simple time trends
Exhibit national or state-level GDP growth as global common factor; counties with negative factor loadings might arguably exhibit decline (_)
Jennie’s suggestion:
- plot county- , CZ, or state-level deviations from a national trend
One way to look at this descriptively is to look at the national, state and county-level trends. Here the “trend” is simply the difference between expenditure per pupil at the relevant level and expenditure per pupil in the first available observation as represented here: https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/DTNLC.pdf. (Note: this measure is imperfect for many reasons).
